Torontonian Robert Priest’s first collection of poems in seven years is a decidedly mixed bag. A sometimes ironic, sometimes angry investigation of contemporary culture, the book tackles a wide variety of subjects.

There are several poems about Elvis Presley that expose the truth behind his legend (one describes him dying on the toilet); there is a series on the Three Stooges, in which Priest graphically, and with black humour, explores society’s fascination with violence; there are satires on Coca-Cola, diatribes against the Ontario government, love poems for Priest’s son, grandmother, and women in general, socially conscious poems against poverty and apathy, and a number of poems that use quasi-religious language to celebrate what it means to live decently on the earth.

Priest writes in a free-flowing, ecstatic fashion, achieving his effects with an accumulation of unusual and often grotesque images designed to startle readers out of their complacency. One poem, for example, details the physical contortions a person must go through in order to swallow a pig whole. Another imagines an episode of the Three Stooges wherein the trio is raped by elephants. The satire is dark indeed, but Priest is clearly holding a mirror up to contemporary life to show us that the reflection is often ugly and distorted.

Admirable though Priest’s aims might be, his poems rarely work. Often, they are simply prose paragraphs with no metrical framework to make them memorable, and their obsession with violence and scatology is ultimately juvenile and tiresome, no matter what message is being conveyed. Moreover, the Beat School technique and rhetoric, able to shock two generations ago, now reads like self-parody.

While Priest shows an obvious compassion for the fate of the individual in the face of political and corporate greed, he does not translate his compassion into interesting poems. For every successful effort, like “Resurrection in the Cartoon,” which provides an engaging blend of television cartoon and religious/mythic imagery, there are a dozen failures.

Then again, for readers especially interested in the Three Stooges or the Elvis myth, or who want to read an attack on Mike Harris, Priest can meet these needs. But for those who expect more depth and subtlety from a poet, I’d recommend looking elsewhere.